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| January 2009 Bestsellers |
1. The Twilight series by Stephenie Meyer
3. 2666 by Roberto Bolano
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| Dear friend of Skylight Books,
 You may have noticed a new section at the front of our store -- featuring books of translated literature. While many of the top-selling fiction authors in translation (Tolstoy, Bolano, etc) will still remain in our fiction section, the new section will feature individual titles from all over the world that we think deserve special attention.
It's the brainchild of staffer Monica Carter, whose nationally published reviews and interviews on  translated fiction, as well as her blog dedicated to world literature (salonicaworldlit) are making her a voice to be reckoned with on the subject. She is currently one of the judges for the Best Translated Fiction Book of 2008, which will be announced at a reception at New York's Melville House on February 19 -- and Monica will be present. (For a list of the award 'shortlist', click here)
The award is co-sponsored by the organization Three Percent (based at the University of Rochester), whose website states that it has the goal of "becoming a destination for readers, editors, and translators interested in finding out about modern and contemporary international literature... Unfortunately, only about 3% of all books published in the United States are works in translation... And that 3% figure includes all books in translation-in terms of literary fiction and poetry; the number is actually closer to 0.7%. ...An even greater shame is that only a fraction of the titles that do make their way into English are covered by the mainstream media. So despite the quality of these books, most translations go virtually unnoticed and never find their audience." Monica is also the buyer for our French and Spanish sections, as well as for our card and children's sections, and the creator/organizer of our monthly Skylight Literary Salon featuring independent presses, so stop by and let her know your thoughts and suggestions -- or email her at monica@skylightbooks.com.
We'll be highlighting more of our passionate and knowledgeable staff members in future newsletters. Have a lovely February.
Kerry Slattery, General Manager  |
| February Events at Skylight Books |
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JOSHUAH BEARMAN, KYLE MINOR and KATHLEEN ROONEY |
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Tuesday, February 3 at 7:30 p.m.
In the Devil's Territory(Dzanc Books) by Minor
Live Nude Girl: My Life as an Object (Univ. of Arkansas Press) by Rooney
  Joshuah Bearman ( LA Weekly and M cSweeney's contributor), joins Minor and Rooney in the LA. leg of their cross-country indy tour reading from new works.
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| CRISTY C. ROAD |
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| Friday, February 6 at 7:30 p.m.
Bad Habits: A Love Story (Soft Skull Press)
 Bad Habits is the mostly autobiographical story of Road's personal revolution. Growing up Cuban in West Miami, the protagonist clashes with what she perceives as the confining and repressive aspects of that culture, and leaves for New York as soon as she's able. Landing in Brooklyn, she moves into a house full of wild characters, and enters an underground scene that few ever see. Of her new family, she writes, "We were the things that went bump, crack, and hump in the night." Find more info here. |
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WRITEGIRL |
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Saturday, February 7 at 5:00 p.m.
Listen to Me: Shared Secrets from WriteGirl
 Contributors to the book Listen to Me: Shared Secrets from WriteGirl will read and discuss their work and the WriteGirl program. WriteGirl is a nonprofit organization for high school girls centered on the craft of creative writing and empowerment through self-expression. Through one-on-one mentoring and monthly workshops, girls are given techniques, insights, and hot tips for great writing in all genres from professional women writers. Find more info here. |
| DONALD SELIGMAN |
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Sunday, February 8 at 5:00 p.m.
Los Feliz: An Illustrated Early History (Los Feliz Improvement Association)
 Finally! An illustrated book about the history of our immediate neighborhood. Come and check out pictures of what used to be where your house is standing now! See Los Feliz Blvd. before it was a traffic-clogged thoroughfare! Hear stories about the history of our beautiful neighborhood and how it's developed through the years! Find more info here. |
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AARON GLANTZ |
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Thursday, February 12 at 7:30 p.m.
The War Comes Home: Washington's Battle Against America's Veterans (University of California Press)
 The War Comes Home is the first book to systematically document the U.S. government's neglect of soldiers returning from Iraq and Afghanistan. Aaron Glantz, who reported extensively from Iraq during the first three years of this war and has been reporting on the plight of veterans ever since, levels a devastating indictment against the Bush administration for its bald neglect of soldiers and its disingenuous reneging on their benefits. Glantz interviewed more than one hundred recent war veterans, and here he intersperses their haunting first-person accounts with investigations into specific concerns, such as the scandal at the Walter Reed Army Medical Center.
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Kids Heart Authors:
Meet children's authors and illustrator EVE BUNTING, SUSAN PATRON, ANN WHITFORD PAUL, ERICA SILVERMAN, KERRY MADDEN, and KATHRYN HEWITT |
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Saturday, February 14 from 10:00 a.m. to noon
 Join us for juice and cookies and learn all about some renowned children's authors, as we participate in the national Kids Heart Authors day with a two-hour event featuring five award-winning authors -- Eve Bunting, Susan Patron, Ann Whitford Paul, Erica Silverman, and Kerry Madden -- and one illustrator -- Kathryn Hewitt. In between story readings, our visiting authors and illustrator will be mingling with the audience, signing copies of their books, and answering questions about their craft.
It's an amazing array of authors, all of whom live in L.A. and have received major recognition, including the Newbery Prize for Susan Patron's book, The Higher Power of Lucky, and Bunting's books are known around the world.
This is a must for parents, teachers, librarians, as well, of course, for kids!
SNACKS! PRIZES! |
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CAROL LAY |
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Thursday, February 19 at 7:30 p.m.
The Big Skinny (Villard)
 Here's the skinny: After a lifetime of yo-yo dieting with pills, hypnosis, and ill-informed half-measures, Carol Lay finally shed her excess pounds and kept them off. Now this California cartoonist shares her experiences in a funny, genuine, and eye-popping graphic memoir that tells Carol's story and shows you how you can do it, too.
Cartoonist Carol Lay's work has appeared in a weekly strip for the LA Weekly, as well as in The Village Voice, Entertainment Weekly, Newsweek, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The New Yorker, Mad Magazine, Worth, and others, as well as several previous books.
Find more info here.
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CHING-IN CHEN and ELY SHIPLEY |
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Friday, February 20 at 7:30 p.m.
The Heart's Traffic (Arktoi Books) by Chen; Boy with Flowers (Barrow Street Books) by Shipley
Of The Heart's Traffic, Library Journal writes, "Chen's debut book of poetry offers an impassioned  record of a girl who grows up without a father, learning to make do and becoming adept at expressing what she's learned in wordplay ranging from dictionary definitions to nursery rhymes.... The Chinese American Chen is equally skillful with English, Asian, and French forms; the book includes sestina, rondeau, haiku, epistle, prose poem, and riddle as it shows Chen's genius with figurative language."
Ely Shipley's first book of poems, Boy with Flowers, won the 2007 Barrow Street Press book prize judged by Carl Phillips. He also won the Utah Writer's Award in Poetry from the Western Humanities Review judged by Edward Hirsch and the Virginia Faulkner Award from Prairie Schooner. He was a finalist for the Academy of American Poets' Levis prize judged by Susan Howe in 2007 and for the James Hearst Award from the North American Review judged by Li-Young Lee in 2003. (Ely Shipley's photo by Christine Marshall)
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CARINE TOPAL and DAVID ST. JOHN |
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Saturday, February 21 at 5:00 p.m.
In the Heaven of Never Before (Moon Tide Press) by Topal; The Face (Harper Perennial) by St. John
 Carine Topal, a native New Yorker, has anthologized the poetry of special needs children and participated in the grassroots organization California Poets in the Schools. In 1994, her first collection of poetry, God As Thief, was published by the Amagansett Press. Her work has appeared in Water-Stone, Caliban, Pacific Review, Greensboro Review and many other journals throughout the U.S. and Canada. In 2004, she was nominated for a Pushcart Prize, and in 2005, awarded a residency at Hedgebrook, as well as a fellowship in St. Petersburg, Russia. She is the recipient of numerous poetry awards, including the Jane Kenyon Poetry Prize, and most recently, the 2007 Robert G. Cohn Prose Poetry Award from California Arts and Letters. A special edition chapbook, Bed of Want, was published by Black Zinnias in January 2008.
 David St. John has been honored, over the course of his career, with many of the most significant prizes for poets. His work has been published in countless literary magazines, including The New Yorker, The Paris Review, Poetry, American Poetry Review, Harper's, Antaeus, and The New Republic, and has been widely anthologized. He currently teaches at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles, where he served as Director of The Ph. D. Program in Literature and Creative Writing. He is the author of nine collections of poetry, most recently The Face: A Novella in Verse, as well as a volume of essays, interviews and reviews entitled Where the Angels Come Toward Us. He is presently completing a new volume of poems entitled, The Auroras.
Find more info here. |
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T.C. BOYLE |
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Monday, February 23 at 7:30 p.m.
The Women (Viking Books)
T.C. Boyle takes on (in fiction) legendary architect Frank Lloyd Wright and some of the women in his life.
 "With his rollicking short fiction and with novels that include The Road to Wellville, The Inner Circle and Drop City, Boyle has been writing his own fascinating, unpredictable, alternately hilarious and terrifying fictional history of utopian longing in America. The Women adds a powerful new chapter to this continuing narrative, and it is Boyle at his best. It is a mesmerizing story of women who invest everything, at great risk, in that mysterious "bank of feeling" named Frank Lloyd Wright. "
-- Joanna Scott, The New York Times Sunday Book Review
 T.C. Boyle is the author of eleven novels, including World's End, which won the 1987 PEN/Faulkner Award, The Tortilla Curtain, which has now sold over 400,000 thousand copies in paperback, and Drop City, a New York Times bestseller and a finalist for the National Book Award. He has also published eight collections of stories and was the recipient of the prestigious PEN/Malamud Award for Excellence in the short story. His stories appear regularly in The New Yorker, GQ, Esquire, McSweeney's, and Playboy. He lives near Santa Barbara in The George C. Stewart House, the first private residence that Frank Lloyd Wright built in California, which is celebrating its centennial in 2009. Find more info here. |
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USC PROFESSIONAL WRITING PROGRAM STUDENTS
with HOLLY PRADO
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Friday, February 27 at 7:30 p.m.
Writing students in USC's Professional Writing Program read from new work. Poet Holly Prado will read as a special guest. Stephen Silke hosts. Student readers include Nicole Bestard, Timothy Green, Sue Kim, Jacquelyn Lazo, and Heather Quinn.
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Science Fiction Symposium: AIMEE BENDER, DAVID SANDNER, MARK VON SCHLEGELL, and moderator CLAIRE PHILLIPS
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Saturday, February 28 at 3:00 p.m.
This short symposium on the science fiction genre will feature a discussion by four writers who will briefly share their own work, followed by a discussion of today's avant-garde in respect to the genre's New Wave past.
Find more info here.
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MORE FROM SKYLIGHT'S BLOG!
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Find us at www.skylightbooks.blogspot.com
We're getting pretty excited about this whole blogging thing here at Skylight. This month, Mikey wrote about those activists you often see outside our store, and his own special brand of activism: encouraging people to peel themselves away from Halo 3 and read a book!
Here's an excerpt from Mikey's blog entry:
 As I walked into my homie's pad, the situation was beautiful. 4-5 dudes huddled around the couch, watching murder after murder on the telly with no idea I'd even showed up. I slowly stepped right up behind them, held my hardback book in the air, and slammed it hard on the wood floor. The second the slap was heard, they all jumped and turned, and then I yelled: "ITS JUST MATTER THAT MATTERS! READ BOOKS EVERYDAY!' Then disappeared. Without looking at their faces, I raced out the door and down the street. No clue if they got the act, but at least I tried. Besides, now they have a free copy of Twilight - something to talk to their ladies about.
Read the rest of Mikey's blog post here, or visit our blog homepage here. And feel free to leave a comment on what you've read -- we'd love to hear your responses.
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NEW BOOK GROUP AT SKYLIGHT
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Tales in the City evolves into Proust book group
 As you may or may not know, Skylight is home to a variety of book groups, from open-to-everyone groups that meet in the store (like The Coyotes, one of our more popular groups), to private groups who register with our store and receive 15% off their book pick that month. One of our groups, Tales in the City: A Gay Men's Book Discussion Group, will be ending it's 9-year run after discussing this month's selection, The Rest is Noise. But in its place, two of the founding members will form a new group that will tackle all of Marcel Proust's 6-volume In Search of Lost Time at the rate of 250 pages a month. The first meeting is at the store on Monday, February 23, at 7:30 p.m.
If you'd like to join the new Proust Reading Group, e-mail John at j.Prusak@att.net. And if you'd like to know more about book groups in general, or how to register your group with the store, e-mail Emily at emily@skylightbooks.com. Check out the book groups on our webpage here. |
Skylight Books
1818 N Vermont Ave
Los Angeles, CA 90027
323 660-1175
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Yearning for witty repartee and intellectual stimulation? How about wine and hors d'oeuvres? Come join us for our new monthly series, Skylight Salon, where our staff shares their faves from small 
house Counterpoint Press, Justin will explore the high-quality illustrated books by FAB Press, and Liz will look 
into Melville House, publishers of, among other titles, the Art of the Novella series.